


Ithaca

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Bad!Francis, But like tender DP, Cockwarming, Double Penetration, Enemies to Lovers, Feminization, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Premature Ejaculation, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:34:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27516919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: On an intimate morning with James Clark Ross, Francis and James reflect back on the evolution of their relationship.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames/Sir James Clark Ross
Comments: 10
Kudos: 43
Collections: Fall Fitzier Exchange





	Ithaca

**Author's Note:**

  * For [robokittens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robokittens/gifts).



Spring, 1850

“I had hoped, Francis, that you’d never find out,” Ross says, tracing the soft, padded curvature of Francis’ spine with his fingers.

“Well, I did. And I damned near ruined everything on account of it.” His head rests on his folded arms in the bed, his eyes softly closed. Relaxed, his brogue is plain and his voice soft, melodic. 

Between them a third body—the slender, dark-haired form of James—stirs. “Would you two save your pillow talk for another time? I’m still _quite_ worn out.”

“The cheek...” Francis Crozier rasps. He is nearly asleep himself. “You, of all people—to ask for peace... and quiet.”

“And besides,” Ross says, “you’ve slept plenty. It’s nearly time to be up.”

“We’ve nowhere to be,” the dark-haired head slurs against his pillow.

“No,” Ross says, wiggling down into the blankets to press his mouth to the elegant column of James’ neck. “It’s just that I simply cannot wait to _quite wear you out_ all over again.” 

Francis turns onto his side, watching them. The contrast pleases him, the pale red hair moving against the dark, and he is content just to watch as Ross reaches down beneath the heavy brocaded blankets to take hold of what he finds there. He is content to listen to the earnest, adoring words Ross murmurs against James’ hair; he is content to simply rest his broad, freckled hand on James’ side as he rolls his hips gently against Ross’ grip. Yet his affection is not pure, not even now. It is Sunday, dawn outside the windows of his bedroom: heaped, ink-colored clouds against a violet sky. And though glad and grateful, echos remain of the humiliated envy he felt of that other Sunday, a lifetime ago, when he had first learned of the intimacies between James Clark Ross and James Fitzjames. 

Francis was trying to dress himself for bed but, in his cups as he was, was struggling to remain upright. In fact, he had at that point simply laid down on his side in the bed, one impossibly unwieldy leg half jammed into his smallclothes, and was laughing in a helpless, sorrowful way at himself when Jopson laid aside his work and came to his aid. 

“Do you think,” Jopson mused, perhaps hoping to distract his captain from his own appalling state, “that Fitzjames thought especially of Ross at tonight’s toast?” (It being Sunday, they had toasted to absent friends.)

“Why would he...” he tried to angle his other foot into the waistband that Jopson held lifted for him, clutching himself by the knee and hoisting his leg up like a sack of flour, “...why would he think especially of Ross?”

“Because of their, ah—history.” 

“And what history might that be?” 

Jopson’s eyes widened—a bit greedily, Francis recalls with a twinge, for it was his only fault to delight in the sharing of some particularly sapid morsel of rumor—and he helped Francis pull his waistband up. “I would not have brought it up, sir,” he said with feigned delicacy, “if I’d known you were unaware of it. The two have been—intimate. That is the rumor bruited about, anyway.” 

Francis nodded. “I’d not heard of it,” he says, attempting to sound indifferent, “but it does not surprise me in the least.” Even now he can recall feeling near sick with it. He can recall as though fresh the jealousy and the rage and the keen, pulsing gush of humiliation painting his cheeks red. He let out a particularly sharp, damp hiccup then, and Jopson, wiser to Francis’ body than Francis was, swiftly fetched a bucket. By the time he woke he was already devising plans to use this knowledge as leverage, but it wouldn’t be until after Sir John’s death that he learned how, exactly, such an ugly and desperate bargain would play out. 

———

Autumn, 1847

“What was it like, James?” Francis asks , smirking. “What was he like?”

James glances alertly up at him from the map he’s studying. “What was what like? Who?” 

It is bitterly cold and always dark and Francis is bored. _Bored_ doesn’t begin to describe it: a child is bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon. This is a deep and grinding sickness, a stagnation in the ice. Mr. Goodsir says there are organisms who lie dormant in the ice for decades and revive at the touch of sunlight, and on good days it pleases Francis to think of himself as such. He may slur and stumble and mutter, pickling himself in the ice (and in whiskey), but it is fine because eventually the sun will wake him and it all will have been a dream. All this, a clumsy somnambulism. 

But most days are bad days, like this one, and he finds himself picking at those around him in hopes of inciting conflict. Jopson never sinks to the challenge, nor does Blanky. Little agrees with whatever he says, nodding with the simple-minded earnestness of a frightened child. He misses how Sophia or Ross would find him offensive and tell him so; in fact, the thought of Ross reminds him—yes. This is a good time. The other officers have left and James is about to, and Francis is too drunk and miserable to care, so he turns in his seat toward James and continues. “Ross. What was he like?” 

James tilts his head and raises his brow. He’ll not feign ignorance, Francis knows. Instead, he dodges. “What makes you think,” he replies icily, “I’d have anything whatever to say to you on the matter?” 

“Come now, James,” he hears himself coax, his tone a parody of blandishment, “surely you’d not miss the opportunity to boast of a conquest.” James is all soft in the drunken haze of his gaze, how he mouths indignantly at nothing dispatches blood—for some absurd reason—to his prick. He feels his lips twist into a hard, licentious grin. “Or was he the conqueror, James? And you the maid?” 

James makes to get up but Francis reaches out and seizes him by the wrist. “Stay,” he slurs, not missing how James’ breath sticks in his throat at the touch. Interesting. “You’ve not answered me.” That he’s quiet—that Francis has, however briefly, not only rendered him speechless but called him to heel somehow—a lovely little jolt skates up the length of his prick.

But then James speaks. “I’ve not a mind to, Francis,” he sniffs. “It is not a suitable matter for discussion.”

“But Sophia Cracroft was fine fodder for you and Sir John to paw over.”

“Christ, Francis, is this another thing you’re _owed_? What is your interest in the matter? I know you and he are great friends, but your interest in the matter seems ... excessive.”

“Prurient, you mean.”

“Did I say that?”

“I did, James. And it is. I want to know...” he pauses, his finger waggling in mid-air. What is it he wants to know? Leverage. He meant to gain leverage. It had even crossed his mind to push his chair back from the table, splay his legs, let what he hoped to gain by said leverage speak for itself—but instead he’s the silent one now.

“—choose your words carefully, Francis.”

“...I want to know what his hands felt like on your body.” _Would have felt like on mine,_ is what he means. But he only catches his breath, having uttered this in one harsh exhalation, and drops his gaze. 

“Jesus, Francis. Did he reject you as Miss Cracroft did?” Instantly James looks sorry he’s said it, for Francis must look as though he’s been bodily struck. He feels it. His eyes go wide and stunned and his mouth, trembling, draws tight. But after an uncertain moment he feels a rasping laugh bubbling up out of his chest and he waves his hand vaguely in James’ direction: a white flag flapping. “Get off my ship,” he snarls. 

He watches James leave, not bothering to hide the naked hunger in his gaze. 

Alone in the great cabin, Francis pours another drink, emptying the decanter. He debates summoning Jopson for a new bottle, but a lurch in his gut warns him against it as he reaches for the bell. So he sits, glowering. 

For so long it had been enough to be friends with Ross, and whatever twinge Francis felt in moments the light caught Ross’ face a certain way—that was natural for a man as lonely as Francis. For even in his moments of greatest intimacy—with Ross, with Sophia—he resisted the fullness of the moment; he held a part of himself frozen and remote within himself. An effigy in ice. He of course longed to be fully present, more than anything. But he could not close the distance between himself and those he loved, and at moments the immensity of what he could not embrace nearly struck him blind. 

But what was this self-imposed reticence if not, in part, a way of cauterizing at the root certain impulses which, left to flourish, might prove ruinous? As far as Ross goes, it had been terrible, that afternoon in the library—the scant minim of hope it offered. They’d both had more to drink than was wise and their fingers met on the spine of the same book just as Francis had said something to make Ross laugh—he recalls the purity of the brilliant winter sun through the tall and narrow windows, the smell of old books. Desiccated, faintly sweet. The taste of whiskey on his lips, claret on Ross’. And then it was over nearly the moment it began: Ross drew back, his eyes wide. Said nothing. Francis cannot to this day recall who kissed whom, though he turns the question over and again in his mind like a coin. Nervous habit.

And it feels obscurely now that whatever door was opened that day in the library, James must be the one to close it. It’s funny, how he’s drawn to that which infuriates him. Of course James and Ross would pull toward one another like magnets, the former being the dark-haired mirror of the latter. Both slender, both vain. For a moment he has a searing vision of them together, James straddling Ross, slender back arched as he rolls his hips. Ross’ hands splayed across James’ thigh, clutching, his face a rictus of pleasure. 

He starts at the sound of a knock and James enters, head dipped apologetically. “Blinding snow,” he says. “Mr. Blanky assures me it should clear soon. A nightcap?” His geniality is brittle; his eyes look tired.

“It’s all right, James. You needn’t feign further interest in my company.” He lifts his glass sluggishly. “Besides,” he utters, “‘s all gone.”

James sits down slowly. Francis stares stupidly at him, his composition all but shattered by his unexpected return. The elegant line of his shoulders and back sweep down to a trim waist: he has that same patrician grace Ross has, probably the same sudden strength coiled in the lithe flow of his body. Because he is buoyantly drunk, he does not turn away in time to avoid being caught out.

“I know you admire my form, Francis.”

Humiliation shears the last vestige of composition from him and he snaps, “How can one not look at you, peacocking about—“

“Let’s discuss this as men,” James says. 

Francis makes a noise somewhere between a snarl and a hoarse, rasping laugh.

“We find ourselves lonely, beset, in one another’s company,” James continues. “And therefore—“

“Therefore, therefore.” Francis waves his hands as he parrots James. “Let’s speak as—less than men. As animals.”

“Francis, you’re really very drunk—“

“I wanted him to love me,” Francis says, much softer. He inhales, huffs it out tiredly. “If I had for one moment suspected—that his interests that way ran—“

“I’ve nothing to do with that, Francis.”

“No. You’d have been the obvious choice regardless.”

James shrugs. “You’re handsome after your fashion,” he says coolly.

“After the fashion of a bulldog. Don’t mock me, James.”

“I am in earnest. You’re a lushington with all the charm of an ass, and you do not deserve your post. And what I offer, I do not offer out of love. But I do...” he makes a baffled kind of gesture with his hands, “...offer it.” 

Francis’ jaw muscles work beneath his pockmarked skin; his eyes water. He strives to ignore his prick drooling into his smallclothes. “Come now,” James presses. “Don’t tell me you’ve never imagined it. I can see you have—I can see you’re thinking of it now.” He glances pointedly at the fullness in Francis’ trousers that he is not bothering to conceal—that, with his leering and sluggish gaze, he seems to dare James to look at. He’s flushed all the way down to where the crisp of his collar is worked open to reveal his padded, freckled collarbone. 

“And what would you have of me?” He asks.

“Consider it... a favor.” 

Francis regards him suspiciously, then nods. “All right, then. I would have you on your knees.” 

“Very well,” James says briskly, as though concluding a bargain at a country market. He climbs down out of his chair and kneels before Francis and nuzzles his open mouth against his thigh. “You will let this matter of Ross go, won’t you?”

Francis nods without even meaning to, so desperate is he for James to just— _ah. There._ James mouths his way to the seam bisecting his stones and exhales hotly against them, the moist heat diffused by the coarse cloth, as he presses his hand against his straining cock. He palms roughly upward once or twice, dancing his slender fingers over the head. He leans back onto his knees and the balls of his feet and gives one last little stroke before reaching to unfasten Francis’ flies—and suddenly Francis is overcome by a thin, quick bliss, a blurt of heat. He gives a low, startled moan and— _goddammit._ James’ gaze flicks over the dark damp spreading across Francis’ lap up to meet his, a quiet and savage triumph in his eyes.

Francis’ hands fly to his face. “Jesus and Mother Mary,” he grumbles into the dark of his palms, an edge of hysteria in his voice. 

James stands up, wipes his fingers on his handkerchief, and sighs. “Another time, then,” he says coolly. 

“You’ll tell no one,” Francis snarls.

“Whom would I tell, Francis?” He bares his long teeth in what might be a grin. “Unless perhaps I jot it down in my next letter to our Captain Ross.” 

———

Autumn, 1850

James’ prick responds sluggishly to Ross’ gentle touch, but there’s no hurry. It’s morning and this type of thing should always be done softly and with great patience in the morning. Pleasure sweeping across in waves like watercolor: let night have the chiaroscuro of panting, frenzied urgency. Ross’ fingers are featherweight on him, dancing up the length of him and stoking a diffuse warmth that does not build but hovers; into this he leans, eyes shut, letting himself smile softly. Distantly, he is aware of Francis stirring. He feels the weight of his hand on his ribs and rolls against him, the curve of his buttocks fitting perfectly against the crook of Francis’ lap. His breath is warm and measured against his neck and his thumb grazes small, soft arcs on his bare ribcage. Francis has gained back what he lost on the expedition and a little extra, and now his perfect belly is flush with James’ spine.

Francis’ fingers slide down the curve of his ribcage, around his waist toward his spine and down. James imagines he can still feel each vertebra beneath Francis’ hands; each little lumpen bone chiming like a bell. So close he came to being only bone, smaller and smaller—and now he gasps as Francis lifts his thigh with one hand and lightly traces the tensed shirring of his entrance with the finger of the other. Then he’s moving down, down, down beneath the blanket, his mouth and tongue blazing a soft and crooked path down vertebra that still hum, alive and alive and alive.

Was there ever a time he did not want Francis? He can’t recall it. Though older by a decade, Francis was—is—still strong, his bullish frame still muscular beneath where he’d grown soft, in his haunches and down the curve of his belly. James recalls, even when he hated him most, the blushing effort of pulling his eyes away each time the firm heap of his hip worked his waistcoat up, revealing bracers and wadded shirt, as though he’d spied something illicit. He longed to linger in patient pleasure over that body, let an afternoon unspool around them as he charted with tooth and tongue and finger each plane, each bank and curve. Now he has that leisure—and Ross, too. His joy, for a moment, is nearly unendurable: that he is here, _here,_ and nowhere else. 

James had loved Francis long before he recognized it for what it was, for in its incipient form it was like a seed jammed in his teeth, a minuscule jutting-out from his gums that he picked at til they bled. It was a fascination that endured the creature Francis was before he was a man. James could not explain his greed for him, his tacit burning looks and the way he conjured his face above him in the dark of his berth. What was he worth? Nothing, James thought: yet at any given moment he would have joyfully submitted to this sour curmudgeon who delighted in nothing. Certainly, from drink and pettiness he sucked a certain barren pleasure but otherwise was a vulgar and cruel man, a mocking parody of his best self. It was as though he had to first be a shell of who he would become before he became him, and James would have to endure all the barbarous sickness of love before he would be healed by it. 

———

Winter, 1847

The drums’ tattoo is measured and solemn as Hickey is led in in his smallclothes. He is more strapping than Fitzjames imagined he would be, a muscular man rather than the scrawny lad he appeared to be in his loose clothes. But he still looks like a boy, fear in his eyes as they dart from James to Francis to the table being carried in. He shuffles up to the table and a marine unceremoniously yanks his pants to his ankles. His wrists are tied to the corners of the table and it begins. The cat makes a different sound slicing into a man’s nates rather than his back: it is a tighter, more saturated sound, almost like you can hear the cupped flesh split.

“Again,” Francis is saying as Hickey jerks against the table, whining through his nostrils like a kicked dog. “Again.” James watches Francis’ eyes sharpen and dance with each arc of the whip and recognizes in them what only a lover can: arousal, all the more smoldering for its being concealed. 

Francis is a hard man, but simple: he likes best to bend James over the table, coltish legs splayed, and fuck him blind. What he can’t accomplish with his prick (as often happens to men who drink like he does, a fact which James points out as often as possible) he gets done with his fingers. Virtuosic yet brutal, he can hold James at the very knife’s edge until he begs. Yet just as often, with no words passed between them, James kneels and is permitted to suck at Francis’ softened prick. It is theoretically to coax the stubborn creature into participating, but at some point it becomes their sole act of tenderness. James holds the weight of him in his mouth, twining his tongue around the give of it, nuzzles against his thigh. And though he does not come, Francis strokes James’ hair, eyes shut. He does not ask what he’s thinking of, or of whom: it is enough to have him there, all tender and naked between his teeth. 

But tonight James is repulsed by Francis, how his blood is evidently stirred by this. It is not at all decent. Not that James can claim innocence. He has encouraged these tendencies in Francis; he has permitted them. It is, he sees now, unwise to indulge a weak man in weak ways. Even his habit of taking him into his mouth when he is impotent—it is a way, James sees now, of worshiping him at his feeblest. Yet that night finds Francis’ head in his lap. He is weeping openly and James strokes his fine, honey-colored hair. It is like this with him: there is so much complication, so much to stomach. And yet in these moments his surrender is stupidly, pulverizingly total. 

“Please,” he says again. “Tell me about Ross.”

“Ross would not have punished Hickey as a boy.”

“You know I don’t mean as a captain—though I am sure you would have preferred him as a captain as well.”

“Easily.” Then, more softly: “But not as a lover. Did you love him, Francis?” 

Francis is silent as he nuzzles his head further against James and sucks in an especially snotty breath. A moment passes between them in which James can feel Francis choosing carefully which path to take—here he might turn sharp and bitter; here he might delve further into the strange intimacy that flares open between them in the most absurd moments. A door to a well-lit room opening.

“As a friend, I loved—love—him dearly. Otherwise?” He laughs his laugh that is not really laughter, his eyes closed. “I’m a fool, James, and don’t know up from down. We kissed once, and he was so disturbed by the experience that I did not see him again until his wedding day.”

“He was already engaged, you know, when he and I—“

“I know. I would have chosen you over myself also.”

“Have you considered that perhaps he did not wish to lose your friendship?“

“I do not wish to consider anything, James.” He sits up, studies James’ face. “And I do not wish to talk about it anymore. What I would like is—“ With a grunt, he hoists himself down. His knees crack softly as he kneels, and his hands, landing on James’ knees for balance, stay. “I owe you a great many favors,” he says. 

“I want no favors,” James says abruptly.

“Are these not still favors we deal in?”

James gazes down at Francis thoughtfully. Whatever was vulnerable in him, whatever he might have offered, has vanished now. Maybe—James feels this thought more than he thinks it, a brittle contracting of his heart—he was mistaken altogether; maybe he who kneels before him has never done anything but tot down tallies. Bargains, shifts in stock. 

“Get up,” James says softly. “And get off my ship.”

Francis blinks, baffled. Then, huffing, he rises, nods once, and departs. His gait stiff and blind as that of a man walking in his sleep.

Later, James knows, he will be made to pay. Later, James will look for a softness in the man’s face he swears he’d glimpsed once or twice. But not only will he not find it there but he will have less and less opportunity to seek it. For Francis begins to withdraw in earnest until he’s nothing more than an absent shape, a rumour, news of a distant disaster. Yet his withdrawal lays the weight of the disaster nearer at hand—putrid food, encroaching ice, the mounting resentment of the men—square on James’ shoulders. Whatever he hoped for he is practical enough to bury, to hide in the shifting gritty grays of the landscape. He directs all his will and competence to the matters at hand. 

It is not until Francis drags himself hand over hand through the bilious dregs of himself as he sobers up that James understands the shame that drove him to leave so easily: love. Shame as sleeping love’s waking twin. 

———

Autumn, 1850

If there is anything more beautiful than James bucking ecstatically as Francis fucks him with his mouth, Ross has yet to see it. He loosens his grip to let James, lithe and panting, hump into his hand in counterpoint to the thrusts and twists of Francis’ tongue. James won’t come this way but he and Francis can hold him in a state of frenzy as long as they care to. Ross will bow, of course, to Francis’ lead—he is, after all, a guest in their bed. But at the moment Francis seems completely content, having repositioned to kneel behind James, affording Ross a view of one thick, liberally freckled shoulder and his cap of reddish blond hair. The generous flow of his back and hips down to where his small-clothes have been worked down to just past his hips. Deshabille—the word turns itself over on Ross’ tongue with a kind of tart, heady savor, and he feels himself hardening.

But there’s more to it than that. Look how unguarded he is, look how even the span between his shoulders is flushed with effort. The freckled constellations that Ross had only dreamed of seeing. The man he loves has been retrieved for him from dark, impossible regions, given back to him. _I have missed you terribly,_ he thinks, and hopes Francis understands as he lays one hand hesitantly in his hair and strokes it. 

He is sure now, having enjoyed these seven years with Ann and seeing the way that James and Francis enjoy one another, that his love for Francis is not of that kind. He wondered, once, if it was, and tried to kiss him in his library. But what he saw in Francis’ eyes that day in the library he still cannot describe: a kind of blind animal terror, like a snake whose dull eye tracks in its last seconds the shadow of the hawk’s talons. He immediately understood his mistake: he’d been too direct, had risked too much. He should have spoken plain to him instead, or lain himself prone at his feet.

For prone is how Francis likes his lovers, Ross has determined: demure of will and demonstrative of their pleasure. There’s something of the tyrant in Francis—always was. Now he lifts his mouth—lips shining—and abruptly twists two fingers at once into James, who cries out from between grit teeth and goes rigid for a moment, then sags onto the weight of his locked arms, his mouth curling into a soft, vacant grin. His eyes softly shut. “There you are,” Francis breathes. “Fair lass o’ mine—cunny fitting my fingers like a glove, sweet Jesus—“ Ross can’t keep his hands from his own prick as Francis continues, his voice low and that beautiful brogue bell clear. “And a fine cunny it is, sweeter than clover honey—hell, lovelier than June you are altogether, curl to toe. What do you think, James?”

“A fair maid, and no lie,” Ross says, coloring up. New to him it is, and unwieldy on his tongue, to call a man a maid, but so pure and organic evidently is the practice between James and Francis that Ross is glad to flow with it—especially as it flushes James so lovely deep to hear it, raises on his lips a soft smile Ross has never seen before. Or perhaps he’d just never seen the truth of him before, the naked gist of him. When they were lovers they were lovers only, not particular friends; even in their most intimate moments James was aware of Ross’ gaze upon him. And so his smile was a dazzling thing, a baroque rendering of happiness rather than the thing itself. And for the duration of the rescue and the journey home, James behaved like a man in a dream—if he was a man at all. To Ross, he seemed an unfinished wraith of himself. His heart dispatching blood through a dead man’s veins.

But now he smiles that secret, lovely smile and it is like—Ross is not a man for metaphor. He tips his face forward and kisses that ghost of a smile. He does not think of what nearly was. He simply does not think of it. And anyway, his focus shifts back to the present when James gasps sharply against his teeth and turns to look over his shoulder. Francis has a sly gleam in his eye, his eyebrow quirked. 

“How many is that, then?” James manages. His voice is rough.

“Four now,” Francis says, and then he turns to James. “I’d be remiss as a host if I did not share the finest of my home, mm?”

“Like in The Odyssey.”

“Close enough,” James murmurs, and his voice is pensive.

“Yes,” Francis says. “Like that. We might even drink from the same chalice.”

“Oh?” Ross feels his face lift into a smile as he grasps Francis’ meaning. He takes James’ chin in his fingers. “Would you like that, dove?” 

“Oh,” James murmurs breathlessly, “it would be a pleasure.” 

Ross strokes himself full as Francis finishes preparing James. He would enjoy watching just the two of them, he’s certain, but is intrigued by the challenge of sharing James’ _cunny_ —a word he is still mapping the feel of, unsure how he feels about it—with Francis. The evening before, he had been treated to the glories of James’ deft tongue and greedy throat, but anything more intimate than that was implicitly forbidden him. Now he finds himself equally aroused by the thought of his cock against Francis’, their seed mixing inside of James—he must let go his prick so as not to come too soon.

Francis lies down on the bed beneath James, whose body now gapes expectantly after such thorough, nearly punishing preparation, and guides himself in. Ross is not sure he’ll make it, for James’ body seems to sucker shut around Francis. Gently, with an oil-slicked finger, Ross rubs at James’ taut rim. Francis eyes are intent on him, nakedly longing, and it makes him almost impatient. But impatience has no place here. Soon, James rocks back onto his finger, then he can take another, and a third. This alone he relishes for a few moments—the fevered, plush press of his knuckles between Francis’ prick and the walls of James’ body. But if impatience has no place here, nor does dawdling, so he slowly inches in. James whimpers and tenses but Francis strokes his cheek, murmuring, “There’s my girl, there’s my good girl.”

And then he’s in. It is scalding and snug and richly slick; he’s never felt anything like it. For a dilated, pure moment they hold; their bodies joined at James’ fundament. 

“All right, James?” Ross manages—barely—to ask. In answer James gives a tentative roll of his hips, gasps, and nods eagerly. Francis’ reaches up and fondles the elegant column of James’ neck, his forearm thick and freckled, before pulling him down into a soft kiss. Ross plants his hands on Francis’ thighs and begins to move softly into the body between them. Quickly, a rhythm is established: James rolls his hips down against Francis while Ross thrusts in from behind. His is the guest’s portion: esteemed, yet less intimate; apportioned to him is not only the honor of setting the pace but also the view of both himself and Francis gliding in tandem in and out of James. This is, in fact, what undoes him—all of it—seeing the synchronized dive and pull of their pricks, the strong width of Francis’ thighs around his own legs and the matted cap of his fair hair beneath James’ dark waves, the fine bones of James’ spine as he lifts and dips the fine platter of his hips. All of it, all of it. Then Francis reaches, reaches, to graze Ross’ thigh with his fingertips—

—just as he had done the night of the rescue, turning where he knelt at James’ side, an unrecognizable look in his eye (like one asleep, Ross concluded later, with his eyes wide open; a sleepwalker’s unseeing and obscurely frightened gaze) Francis did not recognize him until he reached to touch him, his trembling fingers grazing Ross’ thigh. As they do now. Ross reaches down and seizes Francis’ hand and, gripping tight, spends. 

It is a wide warm deluge, slow, and afterwards he realizes Francis must have done the same, for pulling out he uncaps a tide of milky seed that rolls down, coating Francis’ softening shaft. James too has come and the three of them sag into one another, panting and tangled and slick with one another’s spend and sweat.

Ross rises to fetch rags to clean them with but James turns onto his back and reaches out for him. “Stay,” he says. “We’ve time.”

“Yes,” Ross says. “We’ve time.”


End file.
